The Verge: “There’s this picture from more than a decade ago that still goes viral on the web every once in a while. You’ve probably seen it: it was created by the venture capitalist Andrew Parker, and it compares a few dozen startups with subsections of Craigslist. Back then, Craigslist was all things to all people online, and a generation of startups figured they could do part of the job a lot better. Some of those companies failed — sometimes because of Craigslist! — but some also became gigantically successful. Airbnb worked because it was more searchable, reliable, and trustworthy than a random Craigslist listing; StubHub sold you secondhand tickets without the 50 percent chance those tickets were fake; Etsy offered a much more fun shopping and discovery experience than a bunch of text listings and crappy photos. This is the same opportunity in front of the social media landscape right now: a rare chance to unbundle the internet, to pull apart an existing system and rebuild it, piece by piece, in vastly better ways. If we do this correctly — if the next phase of how we congregate and communicate online is built for humans and not advertisers — there won’t be a new titanic company to rival Meta or a platform with eye-poppingly huge numbers like Facebook. What we’ll get instead is something much bigger: an entirely new infrastructure for our online lives that no company or platform controls…” [Read and follow beSpacific postings on Mastodon]